After a short, two-theme break on theme writing to dispatch some unruly midterms, we're back and at it with a procrastinated piece on procrastination.
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Write a story that meditates not only on experience but on how we talk and write about it.
Time has shown again and again that extreme circumstances inspire periods of extraordinary creativity and progress. It took decades of religious oppression to move the Puritans to the New World. It took a war for Picasso to paint his immortalized Guernica. And it took an ominous race of national pride and fear to land man to the moon.
Therefore, this particular late December night, in a darkened kitchen, shivering under three layers of coats, working by the fluorescent light of a computer screen, during a week-long power outage with no light at the end of the tunnel, I should have been able to write a half-decent college essay. They told me not to procrastinate in case extraordinary circumstances arose. So when the tiny, shrieking “told you so!” accompanied the draining battery meter, I could only admit that it had indeed told me so.
Procrastinators wish they were in my coats. I had no time to ponder topics. I would write, or I would go to community college. So my mind blundered in the shadows clawing for anything that could twist into five hundred coherent words. And after two percent of my computer’s juice, it settled back where it started its search. China, where I would go in a few days. That would have to do.
“Really? Seriously?” I muttered to my creative block. “Do you honestly believe that half the kids aren’t writing about visiting China these days?” And I waited, eyeing the barely legible How to Write the Perfect College Admissions Essay on the unlit bookshelf. Then it said back: “Okay, but nobody writes about toilet paper.” So I wrote about both.
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